NITI Aayog and Google to Create AI Ecosystem in India

In today’s increasingly specialized and cut-throat world, a person needs in-depth knowledge and extensive domain expertise to handle a particular department even in a small company. But it is highly unfortunate that people with no qualification or expertise become Presidents, Prime Ministers, ministers, and bureaucrats in India to manage highly complex domains of governance. That’s why India continues to be a poor, underdeveloped country. ~ Click here to read more.

Aiming to foster growth for India’s nascent artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) ecosystem, NITI Aayog and Google have come together to work on a range of initiatives to help build the AI ecosystem across the country.

A Statement of Intent (SoI) was signed to this effect by Anna Roy, Advisor, NITI Aayog and Rajan Anandan, Vice President, India and South East Asia, Google in the presence of Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog.

NITI Aayog has been entrusted to setup a national program to conduct research and development in frontier technologies such as AI. In furtherance of this mandate, NITI Aayog has been developing India’s national strategy on AI along with the National Data and Analytics Portal to enable the wide deployment and use of AI.

Under the aegis of this program, Google will train and incubate Indian AI startups in an accelerator program. These startups will be mentored and coached by Google and its affiliates to enable them to better leverage AI in their respective business models.

To help bolster the research ecosystem, one of the initiatives includes funding Indian researchers, scholars and university faculty for conducting AI-based research.

Further, Google will also bring its online training courses on AI to students, graduates and engineers to numerous cities across India, in the form of study groups and developer-run courses.

NITI Aayog and Google will organize an AI/ML hackathon that will be focused on solving key challenges within agriculture, education, healthcare, financial inclusion, transportation, mobility and more. This hackathon may use Kaggle, a global platform, to help facilitate international participation into these planned hackathon challenges.

Google through the NITI Aayog, will conduct hands-on training programs that aim to sensitize policymakers and technical experts in governments about relevant AI tools, and how they can be used to streamline governance.